Converting tables (spreadsheets) into MindManager Maps

Have you ever been frustrated about adding a table of data to your MindManager map? There it is all nicely arranged. It could be a list of meeting attendees e.g. Ecademy 12th Birthday Party. You can copy and paste it (just the attendee table) on to a map but the result is not what I want. Each row gets concatenated into one topic.

Here is how I process it in Word to produce the map I want. Paste part of this attendee list as unformatted text in to Word or use a simple two column table with a few rows of data.

Then Insert > Table > Convert text to table

Now you have a tabulated set of data. In this case the Name column comes with some excess baggage. Use search and replace to remove the guff. Delete any columns you do not need.

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Andrew is an experienced user of MindManager who shares his knowledge and advice for free here. And provides commercial training and consulting on how to exploit MindManager and other mind mapping software applications in business, organisations and for individuals at Cabre
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Thanks, that is a neat trick, Andrew – I wasn't aware that MM would handle Word tables like that if you applied heading styles to the columns.

Using your Ecademy attendance list as an example, I found it slightly easier to start off by pasting the list into Excel first, which immediately puts it into a table format. I could then clean it up there and paste the table back to Word to convert to MM.

I also experimented with changing the column order to put the organisation first and then applying the heading style formatting. This worked OK, but unfortunately merging the cells with the same organisation name did not produce what I hoped for in MM – a single topic for each organisation with the attendees from that organisation listed as sub-topics (MM converts only the first person's name under each organisation).

There is however a way around this. Set up the word table, apply the heading styles and merge the cells with the same organisation name as I describe above, then convert the table back to text using paragraph returns to separate text. Go through and eliminate all surplus returns (search for ^p^p and replace with ^p), highlight the lot and click the MM button. Hey presto, all the contacts for each organisation appear under the topic for that organisation as sub-topics.

[…] is something I first looked at in a post five years ago which in turn drew on the work of Andrew Wilcox who discovered that just as in a document structured with paragraphs, a Word table to which Word […]